Each of us is going to die, whether we like it or not, but it only hinders acceptance of the fact if we never come near it. If we could see the infinite variety of emotions, insights, experiences and delight in little things that are granted to people as they approach the end, if we knew how human understanding and love can grow and flower in the last stages of life, if we witnessed the peace and tranquillity that is given to us in the last hours before death, we would be less afraid.
The Berber children saw the tranquillity of death in that sunbaked room in Morocco. But we seem to think that our children should be shielded from it. ‘He is too young to be told. It would upset him,’ I have heard. And on another occasion, ironically from a professed atheist, ‘We didn’t know what to tell her, so we said that Granny has gone away to live with the angels in the sky.’ This sort of over-protection is misplaced. Another generation will grow up, remote from reality, and they, in turn, will want no contact with death or the dying. Parents who think they are shielding their children from something unpleasant are ensuring that, when their own time comes, they will be left to die alone.
Yet children are increasingly exposed to violent death on film, television and computer games. They have a morbid fascination for horror and many are allowed unrestricted access to these sources, so they are able to see people carving each other up, and inflicting unimaginable suffering. And this is the generation of children whose parents imagine they are too tender to be exposed to natural death. What an irony!
Many years ago Anthony Bloom, Metropolitan Archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church in England, played an important role in my life. He said that, when he first came to this country, the thing that horrified him the most was the attitude to death that he encountered. As a Russian, he came from a nation and a church where death was a normal part of life, something we all have to face, something known, seen and accepted. But, in this country, he was shocked to find that death was almost regarded as an indecency, provoking the most profound embarrassment, and certainly not a subject to be talked about. To his surprise and dismay, he found that meaningful contact with death was comparatively rare.
He said that he visited an English family where a much-loved grandmother had died at home. The family was grieving, but the children were not around. He asked where they were, and was told that they had been sent away because they should not see ‘that sort of thing’. In surprise he asked, ‘But why not?’ It was the father’s turn to be shocked. He said it was quite unthinkable. The children knew what death was because they had seen it when a rabbit had been killed and half eaten by dogs in the garden, and they had been terribly upset. He and his wife had agreed that they must be sent away because they might have wandered into Granny’s room while she was dying or, which would have been far more upsetting for them, when she was actually dead. Such a possibility could not be countenanced.
Did these parents really mean to leave their children with the idea that their grandmother was now like the dead rabbit, savaged by dogs? Children are highly imaginative. They would have sensed that something was wrong in the looks passing between adults, the hushed voices, the unfinished sentences – the ‘not in front of the children’. Or worse, they might have been told silly lies about their grandmother’s condition, which they would neither believe nor understand. Finally, to be sent away at a time of family crisis would have alarmed and frightened them. Their imaginations would have been inflamed, and they might have invented all sorts of lurid tales about the thing that was happening to Granny that was so terrible they were not allowed to see it.
In being kept away, they were denied seeing the true mystery and nobility of death, which any child can understand. They were not allowed to see their grandmother’s slow decline, nor see her lying quiet and still, nor feel the aura of calm and peace, in fact, holiness, that surrounds the newly dead. They were left to invent their own frightening stories.
And when they returned home, Granny would be gone, with no last days in which to tell her they loved her, no chance to say goodbye, no time to adjust, no funeral –just gone.
David Hackett, consultant cardiologist, is the clinical editor of this book. His wife, Penny, is a nurse and the family is Irish. I was sitting one fine spring morning in their big kitchen with its wide windows overlooking the gently rolling fields and woods of Hertfordshire, talking about this book. It was half term and the children were home from school.
He said, ‘When my mother-in-law died in 2005, in Ireland, she was laid out in the front room, which was the custom. Family and neighbours came in to pay their respects and to say goodbye. My children came, too, to see and to touch their grandmother. I don’t think it upset them.’
I turned to the two children. ‘Did you find it scary, seeing your dead grandmother?’
The boy, aged about thirteen, gave me one of those teenage looks that suggests, ‘Here’s another silly grown-up asking silly questions!’ The girl, two years older, spoke: ‘Well, no … no, not really … just …’ She shrugged, then after a moment’s thought: ‘Just sort of ordinary. She looked … well… sort of asleep. Sort of … peaceful, like.’
She looked towards her brother and he nodded, ‘Hmm, yeah,’ and carried on chewing his toast – I like a man of few words! Obviously neither of them had been upset, much less traumatised, as some people might predict.
I was having lunch with an old friend, Mark. We were talking about my forthcoming book and he suddenly said:
‘My mother died in 1950 and we children were never told.’
They learned, many years later, that their mother, Julia, had developed phlebitis, apparently after the birth of her fourth baby. A clot had dislodged itself, travelled in the bloodstream, and blocked a pulmonary artery, and this had killed her.
Mark was nine at the time. His brother Robert was six and their sister Marian was four and a half. There was also a baby called Fiona, who was about a year old. They are now in their sixties and I have spoken to them all recently.
Both men told me that they could remember an ambulance coming to the house and taking their mother away. Some time afterwards (they cannot remember how long) family friends took the two boys on holiday, to the seaside. It was during this period, they have since concluded, that their mother died and the funeral must have taken place. At the end of the holiday their father joined them, and took them home to a house with no mummy.
Mark said, ‘It was very quiet, very bleak, and we didn’t understand why.’
Robert said, ‘There was a sort of black hole that we couldn’t talk about. No one said we were not allowed to, but you know how children pick up messages. We just knew that it was something the grown-ups wouldn’t approve of us talking about.’
I said, ‘Didn’t you ask questions?’
They had received vague, woolly answers, such as ‘Mummy’s gone to Heaven.’ Later, one of the boys asked where Marian was, and was told that she had gone to stay with Grandma.
Marian tells me she remembers it very clearly as a time of great unhappiness. Her grandmother was rather a remote figure. She says, ‘I was lonely, bewildered, wondering all the time why I was there and not at home. Daddy came to see me from time to time, and then he went away again. But he never brought mummy, and I didn’t know why. I thought perhaps I had been naughty and she didn’t want to see me.’
After about six months or more her father came and took her home. Apparently she ran around the house looking in every room, calling out, ‘Where’s Mummy? Where is she?’ Her father said, ‘Mummy’s gone to Heaven.’ She responded, ‘Well, where’s Heaven? How did she get there? Did you take her? Why don’t you go and get her back?’